THE source of news about science and the environment as they relate to the Hawaiian Islands, hosted by veteran science reporter Jan TenBruggencate. Issues covered include archaeology, astronomy, botany, climate science, conservation, efficient transportation, geology, marine sciences, sustainability and zoology, with occasional forays into other areas, including traditional navigation and canoe voyaging.

Thursday, March 19, 2020

If you were pre-retirement
age and comforted that only old folks were getting severely ill from COVID-19,
understand that things have changed.

Middle-aged
folks are also severely impacted. And even infants, who seemed entirely protected
in early reviews, are at risk.

The high risk
assessment for the elderly came from very early reports out of China, but now
that itʻs a pandemic, and thereʻs a lot more information available, the picture
is growing more complex.

The upshot:
While the death rate is higher among the elderly, the hospitalization rate is
only slightly lower for folks in the middle-age category. One in ten or so people
in almost every age group get so sick they need medical intervention. Those
under age 20 seem to do the best, but anyone with underlying health conditions
is at increased risk.

It is another
justification for the seemingly severe recommendations for keeping your human
contacts to a minimum, and for keeping those contacts at a distance.

Here is a
Centers for Disease Control report on patients within the United States.

It reconfirms
that death rates are highest among the oldest patients—up to a quarter of infected
people older than 85 are dying. The death rates go down as ages go down, but
only the kids under 19 appear to avoid the severest symptoms.

Of the 12
percent of known U.S. patients who were hospitalized, "18% were 45–54
years, and 20% were aged 20–44 years."

Thatʻs 38
percent aged 55 or younger.

In France,
half were younger than 65. In Holland, half were younger than 50.

And while infants
rarely get the disease, and the symptoms tend to be milder than in adults, infants
do get it. Here is a China paper about one fatal case.

During one
week in January in China, six children, with a median age of three years, were
hospitalized with Covid-19. It wasnʻt pretty for them:

"All six children
had previously been completely healthy. Common clinical characteristics
included high fever (>39°C) (in all six patients), cough (in all six), and
vomiting (in four). Laboratory investigations showed that the levels of
lymphocytes, white cells, and neutrophils were below the normal range in six,
four, and three patients, respectively. Four of the six patients had pneumonia,
as assessed radiographically, with computed tomographic scans of the chest
showing typical viral pneumonia patterns."

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RaisingIslands cruises selected scientific literature for research about Hawai'i or performed by Hawai'i scientists. If you've done this kind of research, or you're aware of some we've missed, pleased let us know (preferably with a link or a copy of the paper). The email is hawaiiwriter@gmail.com.Interested in what we're covering? Check the 'archives' below, or to search out areas of interest, see the 'labels' in this column.

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Raising Islands: What's in a name?

Raising Islands.

I borrow the name of this blog, gratefully and with permission, from my friend Nainoa Thompson. He uses the term “raising islands out of the sea” to create in the mind the experience of a voyaging canoe coming up on a distant shore, and of watching distant peaks rise out of the sea as the canoe approaches.

The first time I did it with him, our vehicle was the voyaging canoe Hokule'a and the island was Nihoa. I recall the crew's thrill at dawn, seeing the twin peaks of the island appear, and then the saddle between them, and finally the whole island. Thompson was the non-instrument navigator who had brought us there using only stars, clouds, wind, seas, birds and other cues.

The name of this blog also invokes the idea of responsibility—raising as lifting up, as caring for and conserving.

The key to responsibility is understanding. If we are to care for these islands, we need the kind of understanding of the environment that a traditional navigator needs.